ISR3: communication and data storage for an unmanned ground vehicle

Abstract

Computer vision researchers working in mobile robotics and other real-time domains are forced to confront issues not normally addressed in the computer vision literature. Among these are: communications or how to get data from one process to another; data storage and retrieval (primarily for transient image-based data); and database management for maps, object model and other permanent (typically 3D) data. This paper reviews efforts at CMU, SRI and UMass to build real-time computer vision systems for mobile robotics, and presents a new tool, called ISR3, for communications, data storage/retrieval and database management on the UMass Mobile Perception Laboratory (MPL), a NAVLAB-like autonomous vehicle.